File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0205, message 128


From: steve.devos-AT-krokodile.com
Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 21:52:31 +0100
Subject: Re: Differend Reading Group - my luggage



--------------EB4A7EB8797CE03D2068211B

Lydia

Language is never private, it is always already social. And just as with
techno-science no technology arrives that is not always already social - so an
injustice may be assigned reterospectively but actually its seems as if the
naming and the act are synonomous. The list of injustices was interesting but
equally telling are the injustices that have faded from existence - arguably for
example 'heresy' as a naming,  represented by the burning of the followers of
Amalric of Bena at the stake - is an injustice that no longer exists. (I
phantasize at this moment of the 'naming' of the extermination of Homo
Neanderthal by our ancesters....) - How then does moral progress happen - many
answers - firstly perhaps it doesn't - rather resistance, struggle and
oppression do occur - secondly the phrase 'moral progress' doesn't mean
anything. For us perhaps the issue is always in the shadow of the enlightenment
figures - given Lyotard's undoubted debt to Kant and Wittgenstein (Pretexts p
xiii but also Title xi)  which stand reclaimed by Lyotard as reterospective
'thinkers of dispersion' which shapes our context, however the writers of the
infrastructure are avoided or critiqued. Hence the importance of the usually
unspoken other of 'moral philosophy' which is has in recent times usually been
raised in its softer ethical variant.

And (Address xv) it's always nice to be immediately wrong - 'there will be no
more books' - not so there will be more than ever before... because the number
of readers explodes... (curious how the inhabitants of the G8 countries imagine
that 100Million users of computers is more important than 4bn additional readers
of the text...)

Hence perhaps Lyotard's form - hypertextual with many authorially defined routes
through the maze of the text - (Genre, Style Reader xiv) (...personally this
time, I engage in an essentially linear but discontinuous hypertextual stroll
through the driftwork that is the differend...)

(perhaps it's to early but it seems to me that the terror of totality - our fear
of repeating the two great failed revolutionary experiments of our societies the
USA and SU-1917 is fading...)

regard
steve

>
> First there is an injustice, and then there is the naming of it, says common
> moral sense.  But the awareness of it is not an individual business, not a
> private language business.  If it has been articulated by anyone, it always
> already belongs to language.  Yet, there is a general unease about accepting
> that people produce (moral, among others) truths, that the truth of the
> matter with regards to injustice and suffering is nothing more than a
> narration, a 'fiction' even.  There must be something like pre-discursive
> experience that suffers under certain discursive systems and that
> precipitates moral change. Indeed, how does moral progress happen?  How do
> "symbolic orders" get pervaded by new sounds and metaphors that turn into
> general awareness of a grievance?  What allowed phrases such as 'aint I a
> woman', or the 'bluest eye', to capture the discursive field and stir it
> irreversibly?

--------------EB4A7EB8797CE03D2068211B

HTML VERSION:


Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005